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Scouting and Resources
Scouting and Resources I decided to combine these 2 simply because scouting attacks and resource management and gain are the 2 fundamentals that everyone playing should understand intimately and be doing 90% of the time they online. There is a lot that is mentioned but not thouroughly dealt with and this is simply because those concepts fit better within other guides where the reason for them makes a difference Resources Production Ok so first off is resources and how they work. You acquire resources at an hourly rate even though you get those resources every 10 minutes (need to check exact timing). The only resource that is deducted from is your food, you produce -1 food for every unit that you control. At this point there is no penalty for having 0 food, but I do not believe it will stay this way for ever. All % boosts to your resources are added to your base value, so if you made 100 food an hour and had a 100 troops you would have 0 food per hour production, but if you got a 10% to food production then you would have 10 food an hour. the only ways to increase your hourly production of resources is to either upgrade your production buildings or occupy wilds. I advocate a occupy wilds over upgrading any day (once you reach a certain level of building which is around 14). i'll give you the maths now so you can see why. Upgrading a level 15 iron mine will cost you 14400 iron and increase iron production by 24/h. you would thus be recieving an extra 576 iron a day. at this rate it would take you 25 days to get that 14400 iron you spent back before you start making a profit as it was. now this is of course ignoring the fact that you spent stone lumber and food, which makes this an even worse bargain. The only reason i would say you should upgrade your production buildings is for the boost in prestige which will eventually allow you to occupy more wilds and strongholds. Furthermore never produce more than 3 buildings a day, as this is the requirement for the daily, which might only give you 2 small carts but it is a little something to offset the balance. Another possible reason to upgrade your resource buildings is because of the new patch (now changed back but i think they just sorting out bugs) and thus your buildings will now produce attack safe resources. But even with all this reasoning i just can never justify upgrading my production buildings for so little return when i could rather upgrade my barraks/warehouse/cuty hall Acquisition The only other ways to gain resources are through acquisition and purchasing. Purchasing needs no explanantion, spend gold or copper to buy resources.... so exciting. Acquisition of resources can be done through either items or by attacking other players. Firstly items can be gotten from the various daily rewards and from treasures. Attacking other players is what this game boils down to and what most of these guides will relate too, that and defence but we will get to that at a later stage. we will deal with the first and most important part of attacking other players in the next section. But before we get onto that let me just quickly deal with the technical side of player farming. Before the patch on 13/03/13 (and now after the patch on 14/03/13) this is how resource production worked offline. You would continue to produce resources at your usual rate that would then be stored in your warehouse. Until you recieve your first offline attack all these resources would be 'active'. so say i had 3000 iron when i went offline and produced iron at exactly 1000/h, after one hour i would have 4000. Simple enough but now here is where it gets tricky. Say i recieved my first attack offline exactly as i reached 4000 iron, that player would loot exactly 1000 iron. (looting is calculated at 25% of players current active resources rounded down) I would now be left with 3000 iron, but would still be producing iron at 1000/h. Any iron i produce after that first attack, however, becomes inactive and is not calculated in future attacks. So say in the above example the player waited an hour before he attacked expecting to get 1000 iron again, he would in fact only recieve 750 iron. Even though i have 4000 iron, only 3000 of it is active, the other 1000 was produced after the first attack and thus is inactive. For this reason, logging on to just check reports is one of the worst things you can do, if you havn't been on in awhile then spend all your resources before logging out as a log in activates all your resources again. The patch made things a bit tricky, and i do not think they have abandoned the idea but are rather ironing out a few bugs. The change that was made was in regards to resource production from your buildings. This is now stored in your buildings and is produced every half an hour too a maximum of 48 units (or 24hours). you need to manually collect those resources in order to add them to your warehouse. This protects those resources from ebing farmed while you are offline and this is troubling to a number of people. Personally i do not think it is that bad and these are the reasons why. Firstly it is only real protection for new players as they have no wilds and are just starting out. That means the community grows as players are not scared away so quickly by starting up and then getting farmed before they can get going. Secondly, wilds are still sent straight to the warehouse and thus anyone with wilds is still a target, and these are generally the targets you want anyway as they have a decent amount of resources to take. Thirdly, it is impossible for someone to spend all thier resources everytime they log off, they will often be left with a few thousand stone/iron/food (I ignore lumber simply because no one really needs any, if you do please PM me as i have thousands to sell, my warehouse is peramanently full of it, and i can probably over charge you as you clearly doing something wrong :D). Thus farming will be affected, directly with regard to permanent inactives, indirectly by lower offline production rates but all the principles still aplly when it comes to farming players and it is something you have to do Scouting Scouting Reports I originally wanted to deal only with scouting attacks, but since my guide on alliance mail i have had a few question relating to scouting reports. There is only one time that scouting reports are useful and that is when it is used on NPC wilds. All a scouting report tells you is how much of each troop your target has on that particular spot at that particular time. So against an NPC wild you know exactly what he has and in what position it is and can plan your formation accordingly (either VF or SF). Against a player it tells you nothing and you will realise why in the last section. There are of course exceptions to the rule, for example during field battle you will want to know if the field is defended etc. Scouting Attacks (SC) A scouting attack (SC) is what 90 % of your attacks on other players and their wilds should be. An SC is simply a minumum number of units required to perform a successfull attack on an unguarded target. The minimum is 5 catapults or 6 archers/cavalry/infantry. Personally i always use 6 archers due to costing, while 5 cattapults may be less units you do loose a number of SC's and thus the stone requirement becomes steep. You should constantly be sending out SC's while you are online looking for unguarded targets with resources. once you find one keep hitting them until you have depleted their resources. What i like to do when i find one is hit them with 4 attacks in a row until they drop below 1000 then i usually hit them with 2, or 3 if i start when they still above 1000, and send my other attacks out looking for new targets. SC's are also a nice way to farm guarded targets. you send in your best army (only if you know you will win and there are a lot of these situations as you will soon learn) and straight away follow it with 3 SC's, thereby giving him a choice. he can let 4 attacks in or stop your 3 SC's but lose his army. this is what an SC is and the basic of using them, I will deal more with them in future guides (using them in attacks, defending against them, having your SC's as Dummy units etc) but for now let me try and explain the power of an SC. Information Information wins games, there is nothing stronger than gathering information on another player. There habits, reactions and current strength. At this is one of the reasons an SC is so powerful, it gathers you a wealth of information on a player for a minimum cost. A scout report will cost you 10*players level for a report on how many units they have in their city. An SC against a player will tell you if they online, are their walls up how do they defend, how do they react to attacks and most importantly if they are successful will tell you how much unguarded resources they have, I will deal more in depth on how these attacks tell you this information in later guides and what to do with it. But to demonstrate the power of this information, when i was only level 9-11 a level 19 decided to start farming me. With my guerilla tactics and SC i got him into such a state of rage that he moved and posted my co-ords on wc for 3 days. SC's are also how i got into Riotsquad when they were number one, as a player near me had no idea how to handle my attacks and so invited me to the alliance in order to call a ceasefire.